Intel to sample PRAM this year (Updated)

Intel is set to sample its forthcoming flash-killer, phase change memory, in …

Intel's new phase-change memory technology, called PRAM by Intel and PCM by others who are working on the same type of memory, is set to sample in the first half of this year. The company's flash memory group announced the news at an analyst and press event yesterday, and it was covered by the EET among others.

Intel says they plan to ship the first PRAM modules as a straight-ahead NOR flash replacement so that they can work the kinks out of the design before trying to move it up the memory hierarchy. The company claims a much higher number of read-write cycles (100 million) than flash, as well as a potential 10 years' worth of data retention. NOR flash is typically used as program storage memory for mobile devices like cell phones, while more durable but slower (for random read access, but not sequential bursts) NAND flash is used for mass storage in devices like the iPod nano.

Samsung, IBM, Intel, Hitachi, and others have all been actively researching phase change memory as a likely flash-killer. PCM's advantages over flash are numerous, and in fact the technology gets us closer to the Holy Grail of computer memory, i.e., a nonvolatile medium with a small cell size and fast access times, sort of like DRAM but without the volatility and the refresh circuitry. However, PRAM doesn't quite get us all the way there.

I haven't been able to find any access time numbers for Intel's PRAM technology, but competing technology from Hitachi boasts a 20ns read latency. This is much better than the 50ns to 90ns read latency typical of flash memory, but it's not even close to DDR2's ~3ns latency. If Intel's PRAM is in the same ballpark as Samsung's technology, then it won't be used as the main memory on your computer anytime soon.

Some consider MRAM a more likely candidate for an eventual non-volatile DRAM replacement. MRAM has many of the same advantages as PRAM, and companies like IBM and Motorola that are working on it claim that they can eventually get it down into the same read latency range as DRAM.

Intel began work on PRAM in 2000, when the company licensed a phase change memory technology from Ovonyx, Inc. The company hopes to enter production with its 128Mbit part at the end of this year.

Samsung has demonstrated a 512Mbit PRAM chip, and has announced plans to offer a full lineup of PRAM products sometime in 2008. The company began sampling 256Mbit and 512Mbit parts produced on a 90nm process to mobile phone manufacturers at the end of last month.

Update: I spoke with Intel's Greg Komoto, the product manager in charge of phase change memory, and he told me that the company is not releasing any product details at this time. The company demonstrated a 128Mbit part, but he wasn't able to tell me the size range of the parts that will begin sampling later this year.

I asked Greg about PRAM's access latency, and he couldn't give me an exact number. However, he did say that PRAM's random read access latency is very comparable to DRAM. "Phase change memory fundamentally has a very fast read speed, and how the bandwidth is depends on how it's configured in the actual end product," said Komoto.

I also asked Komoto about how Intel views Samsung's progress on the PRAM front.

"One of the things that we believe that Intel has excelled at in the past is taking a product innovation and successfully commercializing it," he said. "Intel was the first to successfully commercialize various memory technologies, like DRAM, EPROM, and the original flash memory, and bring them into high-volume production." Komoto also stressed Intel's ability to foster the market introduction of new technology, and he pointed to the company's successful NAND flash business as an example of this.

"Our goal is to be first in volume production [of PRAM]," Komoto said. As for the subsequent pace of PRAM market penetration, this would depend on the market's response and on the introduction of new PRAM products.